Five years ago today, Thomas Friedman said the Iraq War was about telling the Middle East to ‘suck on this.’

Atrios notes that five years ago today, New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman told Charlie Rose what he believed the war in Iraq was essentially about telling people in the Middle East to “suck on this” after 9/11:

FRIEDMAN: You don’t think, you know, we care about our open society. You think this bubble fantasy, we’re just going to let it grow? Well, suck on this, ok. That Charlie, is what this war was about. We could have hit Saudi Arabia, it was part of that bubble. Could have hit Pakistan. We hit Iraq because we could. That’s the real truth.